A Muslim Diarist: Mirza Salih in Later Life (Drawn by Karl Karlovich Gampel’n)

Editor's Note: This article was written before the Paris attacks that took place on 11-13-15.

The
relationship between "Islam and the West" is perhaps the most
pressing question of our times. And yet it is also the most difficult
to grapple with. With around 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today
(not to count those of previous centuries), what can the singular
label "Islam" possibly mean? And what indeed can we mean by "the
West," a term embroiled in the ideological boundary marking of the
Cold War? Historical method can help us here but it demands that we
frame questions in terms of agents and contexts, in the specific
terms of who and when. Promoting such an approach is more important
than ever at a time when both Muslim and anti-Muslim demagogues use
such simplistic but seductive dichotomies. In fact, the more specific
we become – the more we zoom in the historical microscope – the
more difficult it becomes to recognize the Islam/West dichotomy other
than as a form of divisive rhetoric.

In my latest
book, I have tried to
pursue this approach through a microhistory of Europe’s first
Muslim students, who in 1815 wandered into an England on the verge of
its century of industrial and imperial domination of the globe. If
there was such a thing as "the West" in the months after the
defeat of Napoleon, then London was it. But as the students would
learn, encountering a European society in its full complexity defied
the simple reductionism of binary opposites.

Instead of
trying to grapple with the abstract categories of Islam and the West,
I have reconstructed the activities of those six particular young
Muslims. Two centuries ago this fall, they arrived in England from
Iran with the aim of acquiring what they called the “new sciences”
(‘ulum-i jadid)
emerging from the scientific and industrial revolutions. Fortunately,
one of the students left a diary in Persian. Never previously
translated, it details their movements over the four years they spent
in London and elsewhere. Together with the letters and papers left by
those who taught or otherwise knew the students, the Mirza Salih’s
student diary has made it possible to reconstruct their encounter
with ‘the West’ not only in concrete terms but in the terms that
they saw it themselves.

One of the
most striking elements of Mirza Salih’s diary and the letters of
his companions is their enthusiasm for the society they discovered.
And discovered is the key term, since aside from an ambassador sent a
few years beforehand, they were Iranian explorers of what was, in
terms of direct observation, an unknown world. As far as the students
were concerned, the "great divergence" that many historians now
discuss had already happened and they set themselves about the great
intellectual task of understanding why. In a sense, they were
indigenous pioneers of development studies, asking questions about
the role of politics, trade, war, education and industry in shaping
the new kind of society they witnessed around them. Mirza Salih
filled his diary with all kinds of observations that, while they at
first appeared to me a random miscellany, became clear in their
purpose when I read them through the logic of his task. For example,
he kept careful notes on roads, stagecoaches and the mail system; on
cod fisheries and coal mines; on newspapers and charity schools; on
cloth mills and Catholics; the list goes on. Most fascinatingly of
all, he filled dozens of pages with a summary of British history that
I have managed to trace back to the source from which he absorbed not
merely the facts of English history but their moral lessons. He was
reading the History of England
by David Hume, that paragon of the Scottish Enlightenment who saw
English history as revealing the tortured but attainable path towards
liberty. It was a lesson that Mirza Salih absorbed fully, more than
once referring to England as the vilayat-i
azadi, or “land of freedom.”

There were
also of course cultural dimensions to the encounters between these
six Muslims and the locals for whom they were the first “Mussulmans”
they ever met. In some cases, this involved such basic matters as
dining habits, of what the English ate and how they ate it, as well
as their social customs, entertainments, and forms of dress. Not only
a pioneer of development studies, Mirza Salih was also in this regard
a pioneer ethnographer, quite literally insofar as he wrote his diary
with the intention of making English ways intelligible to later
travelers from his country. Once again, his position on England’s
cultural life was broadly enthusiastic, particularly when it came to
museums, theatres and literature. Given how postcolonial theory has
taught us to regard the expression of “Orientalism,” it is more
than a little ironic that of all the works of English literature they
were exposed to, the students claimed to be most fond of Sir Thomas
Moore’s Lalla Rookh
and Lord Byron’s Oriental
Tales.

Yet the most
striking aspects of their encounter with England were religious.
Indeed, religion seems to have been the most common precondition of
their interactions with the English. The religion in question,
though, was not Islam but Christianity. Whether their hosts were
pioneering female writers, mathematical engineers or university
professors, their perpetual insistence on religion as the grounds for
encounter shows that the England the students visited was not yet the
implicitly secular “West” but still very much part of
“Christendom.” After all, the young Muslims had reached London
just as the Evangelical ascendance was entering its steepest arc.
Powerful new missionary societies were proclaiming England’s rapid
acquisition of an empire as a charge from God to convert its heathen
Muslims and Hindus. Moreover, unlike the academic landscape of modern
America, there were no liberal college towns for these foreign
students to escape to, for nowhere did they find themselves more
pressured to convert (or at least cooperate) with the Evangelicals
than in the varsity towns of Oxford and Cambridge. Little wonder that
they chose to flee the godly spires of Oxford for the more frivolous
ballrooms of Bath.

Yet rather
than rejecting these Christian overtures, Mirza Salih and his
companions took a keen interest in Christianity, especially in the
variety of its forms they found almost a century and a half after the
Toleration Act of 1689 gave freedom of worship to Protestant
dissenters. Among those dissenters, they took a special interest in
the Unitarians who had just been liberated through the Doctrine
of the Trinity Act in 1813.
In the chapels of Bristol, Mirza Salih and his friend Mirza Ja‘far
held long discussions with Unitarians like Lant Carpenter and wrote
with great sympathy for their rationalizing new theology. They also
took a deep interest in the Natural
Theology of William Paley, whose
famous analogy of the universe as the creation of a divine watchmaker
they regarded as proper to the new age of reason in which they saw
themselves as partaking.

As I see it,
the lesson of my book is that when we look closely, the encounter
between "Islam and the West" is always an encounter between
specific people in specific places. Even the more abstract field of
ideas and discourse is shaped by such concrete exchanges (a topic I
explore on a global level in my Terrains
of Exchange). And far from being
predetermined by civilizational or religious backgrounds, quite what
comes out of such encounters is in the hands of the people involved.

In meetings
between human beings who shape the social reality of religion – its
embodiment and enactment – it is for each party to choose what to
give and take from the other. This is not so much a naïve as an
empowering message, because it reminds us all – Muslim or
Christian, "Eastern" or "Western" – that we are not slaves
of the categories we impose on others and ourselves. In our
globalized world, we cross the boundaries of such dichotomies every
day. When Mirza Salih and Co. reached London in 1815, the connected
world of today was just being formed. Two centuries later, they can
still show us how to navigate it.